Dell Technologies World: Amex CEO on how Covid-19 has accelerated consumer adoption of e-commerce
Summary
American Express CEO Stephen Squeri claims that Covid-19 has accelerated consumers’ adoption of online shopping methods by three to five years, and it remains to be seen how many will switch back to bricks-and-mortar stores once the pandemic ends. “So we’ve been on this journey, utilising AI [artificial intelligence] and utilising machine learning to help make credit decisions, to help make fraud decisions, to anticipate for our card members what offers to give them.” The way that the pandemic has served to reshape and accelerate the pace of digital transformation in various industries was a recurring theme of discussion during the keynote, with Jeff Clarke, chief operating officer and vice chairman of Dell Technologies, sharing details of how Covid-19 has changed the tech giant’s own thinking on remote working. On the latter point, Clarke expanded on how the decision to embrace a hybrid working model, post-pandemic, means it can bolster the diversity of its workforce by enabling the company to tap talent in “under-represented populations and communities” around the world. And technology is at the centre of everything.” These trends have big implications for enterprise IT estates, particularly from a complexity point of view, as firms will need to figure out the best place to deploy workloads based on where their users are, said Dell. Read more about post-pandemic IT trends • Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sets out his vision for how the world of work, and the IT underpinning it, will need to change to become more flexible and decentralised once the Covid-19 pandemic is over.